초록

This essay is to show the British Romanticism’s contribution to the making of British imperialism through a Wordsworth’s case. One way of doing it is to pay a close attention to the parallelism that exists between Wordsworth’s poetic career and Napoleon’s political career. One important finding from such a juxtaposition is that both Napoleon and Wordsworth made their major professional careers after their alleged apostasy from the revolutionary ideals that they had once supported with enthusiasm. Another finding is that their ‘apostasy’ was actually nothing but the replacement of a cosmopolitan republicanism with a nationalistic imperialism.
The body of this essay are devoted to the elaboration of such replacement. First of all, Wordsworth’s mental conflict between his republican sympathy towards the Revolutionary France and his natural attachment to his native country is examined in the context of the semantic history of patriotism. Secondly, “Michael,” one of Wordsworth’s pastoral poems, is presented as Wordsworth’s poetic attempt to set the paradigm of English national character particularly in relation to his strong attachment to the “primordial” land. Thirdly, some passages from “The Pedlar,” “The Prospectus to the Recluse” and “The Excursion” are examined to explain the way Wordsworth’s nationalistic awakening is gradually pushed into the expansionist ideology of British imperialism. The final conclusion of the essay is that Wordsworth’s nationalistic tendency was made into a very unnerving proclamation of an imperialistic preacher through the quintessentially Wordsworthian poetics that would transfigure the individual experience of ‘I’ into that of a universal Man.